Opinion: Who is an Indian, and why DNA tests do not matter

A descendant of famed Native American Pocahontas asked Senator Elizabeth Warren to get a DNA test.
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Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., addresses an audience at Belkin Family Lookout Farm during a town hall event, Sunday, July 8, 2018, in Natick, Mass. Warren is hosting the town hall and cookout following an Independence Day trip to visit U.S. troops in Iraq and Kuwait. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)(Photo: Steven Senne/AP)

Is Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren an American Indian (Native American)? Most tribes would define her as a "wannabe" and are generally offended by her claims of Indianness.

Who is defined as an American Indian and how much Indian blood quantum (blood degree/ancestry) is required vary over time, from nation to nation (the USA and Canada), from government bureau to bureau (Bureau of Indian Affairs and Bureau of the Census), from state to state, and from tribe to tribe.

In the past, the Cherokees, for example, defined anyone who had a Cherokee mother (and thus membership in one of the seven Cherokee clans) as Cherokee, despite blood quantum. Beginning in the 1820s, however, anyone with a Cherokee father was also declared a Cherokee, even though such people were clanless.

Most, but not all, federally recognized Indian tribes hold lands with federal reservation status. There are three federally-recognized groups of Cherokee Indians in the USA. Only the North Carolina group has federal reservation status to their lands.

In the early 20th century, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina set the minimum blood degree at 1/32 (the equivalent of having one full-blood, great-great-great grandparent) but eventually raised it to 1/16 (the equivalent of having one full-blood, great-great grandparent). When this happened, some Cherokees found they were no longer legally Cherokees.

The Keetowah Cherokees in Oklahoma set their minimum even higher, at one-fourth (the equivalent of having one full-blood grandparent), while the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma has done away with blood degree altogether and requires only that one establish lineal Cherokee ancestry to those listed on the Dawes Roll of 1899-1906.

The majority of federally-recognized tribes in the USA set the minimum blood degree at one-fourth, but some set it even higher. The Florida Miccosukee, Mississippi Choctaw, and St. Croix Chippewa, for example, set the blood degree at one-half (the equivalent of having one full-blood parent), while the Utah Utes have the highest blood degree at 5/8 (the equivalent of having one full-blood parent in addition to one parent who is at least one-fourth blood degree).

Canada used to define Indianness as having a father who was recognized as an Indian (mothers did not count), but in the 1980s Canada switched to a system of blood quantum.

The United State's Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) recognizes the various blood degrees required for tribal membership but requires a minimum of one-fourth for things like higher education grants. So, for example, someone enrolled in North Carolina’s Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians who had a blood quantum of 1/16 to just less than one-fourth would be viewed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs as legally Cherokee but not legally Indian.

Beginning in 1960 the United State's Bureau of the Census has required only self-identification as Indian to be counted as Indian on the census. Before 1960, individual census takers decided who was and was not Indian, usually based either on whether someone physically looked Indian or had what seemed to be an Indian surname. Many census takers counted Indians as "mulattos" (mixed race people), even if they were full-blood Indians.

A woman performs a traditional Native American dance during the North American Indian Days celebration on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Browning, Mont., Friday, July 13, 2018. North Dakota Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp says Native American women are often subject to high rates of violence. "It becomes a population that you can prey on because no one does anything about it, because there's no deterrence, because there's no enforcement and no prosecution," said Heitkamp, who has introduced a bill aimed at addressing this issue. (AP Photo/David Goldman)(Photo: David Goldman, AP)

Some states have no definition of Indianness, while many have less precise definitions than the federal government. Some states, such as South Carolina, with state Indian reservations, are more precise. The state of North Carolina has a government agency to deal with those they recognize as Indian. The federal government recognizes only one North Carolina tribe, the Cherokees, as being Indians while the state recognizes many others, including the Lumbee, Waccamaw Siouans and Haliwas.

So, who is an Indian depends on the time period, the country, the federal bureau, the state, and/or the particular tribe.

But what is the motivation for even attempting to define Indianness? The answer involves Indian treaty obligations. In the United States, American Indians are unique among all ethnic groups in often having treaty obligations that flow to them from the federal government. While these obligations are often insignificant and inexpensive, the federal government still feels obligated to define who can and who cannot be a recipient of these obligations.

Contemporary Indians are the descendants of people once recognized by the federal government as independent, sovereign nations with whom treaties could be concluded. At the end of the 19th century, the U.S. Congress ended the practice of treaty making with Indians but affirmed that all existing Indian treaties were still legal, binding documents. So, to continue to fulfill the obligations of these treaties, the federal government must come up with a definition of who is an Indian.

DNA tests are never used to define Indian identity, and tribes in America have generally refused to submit DNA samples as a baseline for defining Indianness in others. Most DNA tests, therefore, use Central and South American Indian DNA for their baselines in the assumption that Indian DNA is the same throughout the Americas. Since Indians in the Americas are descended from at least three separate major migrations into the Americas, this may not be true. Those with Latino ancestry are more likely to test as Native American.

There are a variety of reasons Native American (American Indian) ancestry may or may not show up in a person’s DNA. One obvious reason for its absence is that a person may never have had any Native American ancestors. There are, however, other reasons.

For most Americans with Native American ancestors, that ancestry is five or more generations back. In fact it can be so far back in a family tree that it does not show up in DNA tests. Also, most ancestry testing companies use only a small sample of Native American groups (often less than half a dozen tribes) as a reference for testing, and all of those sample groups tend to be from South, rather than North, America.

Another important point about Native American DNA ancestry should be made. Anthropologist Mary Helms created the term "colonial Indian tribes" in the 1960s to refer to societies which originated as recognizable entities only as a direct result of colonial policies. Colonial tribes are often a racially mixed people that over time became identified more with their Indian ancestry rather than their African or white ancestry.

These groups are culturally Indian while ultimately having little, if any, Indian DNA. Colonial tribes include groups as diverse as the Miskito Indians of eastern Nicaragua (whom Helms studied); various Amazon tribes in Brazil; the Lumbee Indians of North Carolina; the Black Seminoles of Oklahoma, Mexico, and the Bahamas; and many others.

The term colonial tribe attempts to get at the idea that someone can be culturally something (Native American, for example) without being biologically something. So, for all of the above reasons, it should not be surprising that someone with, for example, a Lumbee Indian ancestor would not necessarily test as having significant or any Native American DNA.

Sharlotte Neely Donnelly is a University Heights resident, retired Northern Kentucky University anthropology professor and author of Snowbird Cherokees and Native Nations and dozens of other publications.